<p>I do not know easier or not. It depends on HS grades and score, I do not see any problem getting into college, for us it was important that it was free for our kid becasue of her plans for Grad. School. She did not have problem getting UG tuition covered by Merit awards. There is a college for everyone who wants to go, I do not see how some would not get anywhere, never heard about it.</p>
<p>I remember one student in particular who was very stressed, about coming up with the $ for Case Western Reserve. She frantically searched for scholarships and would give us daily updates. She did find the funds to attend.</p>
<p>The year I applied for college, the probability for a kid to get into ANY college is 1.7% in my country. The chance of getting into top 2 universities is like 1 in 5,000. But I felt it’s much easier for me than for S. Because I knew that as long as I get a certain score in my college entrance exam I will certainly get into the top U. Unlike S, even though he had 2400 SAT, 4.65GPA, tons of APs and ECs there is still less than 5% chance to get into top school here because he is a unhooked ORM. And you have no control of other factors. He did get into his dream school but it was much more uncertain before the letter was received.</p>
<p>" remember one student in particular who was very stressed, about coming up with the $ for Case Western Reserve"
-Case is very well known for awesome Merit packages, that are not that hard to get at all. My D. had Merit scholarhips that coverd all bu $5k / year of tuition, but she choose to go to public state that covered all tuition + for a different reason. Her UG happened to be a perfect match for her, with opportunities well beyond expected. sometime people underestimate what is available there. Looking back, D. might not have the same wide range of experiences and opportunites if she went to Case. She is very grounded person and never was aspired to go to some “fancy” (her terminology) school after graduating #1 from private prep. she was correct in her assessment relying on the fact that she will do great anywhere as long as she feels comfy at place and “fancy” prestigious status does not matter.</p>
<p>Way easier. I applied to Penn and Cal and was accepted at both. State school which is a reach for many now was backup afterthought. No subject tests, no study for SAT, Strong overall grades but D in Geometry. Typed Penn essay in basement with no parental or other adult input and no outside editing of proofreading. I was a national merit scholar with 650/640 SAT (on old scale) Played soccer and was an exchange student, but don’t even remember filing out an activities section of app. No special ECs. CRAZY thinking back on it.</p>
<p>At my top public CA HS, I never heard of anyone prepping for the SAT, or taking it more than once. Actually, I remember hearing that it was not possible to study for the SAT. The only people I knew who applied to more than one school were the ones who applied to Stanford. Otherwise, it was one application, one UC school and that was it. But Stanford was always difficult–one of my friends was 4.0, School paper editor, great SAT’s but was rejected. USC was a piece of cake. No one with good grades would actually apply there–the word was if you could pay, they’d let you in. This was 1973. I never heard of college visits, unless it was to go up to UCLA to party with somebody’s older sibling in the dorms. If there was an essay for UC, I don’t remember it, it must have been no big deal. EC’s? What the heck is that? I don’t think that was part of the application. Why would a college care if I was in the school play?? It never occurred to me that I could be rejected. The cost of my UC education? $627 per year. Oh, and my very generous parents used to give me $180 per month to cover my rent, food, books, whatever else. It’s much harder now, and expenses are out of control. I remember filling up my VW bug with gas for about $5–maybe $.30 a gallon. And remember, they used to wash your windows, check your oil, fill your tires… I guess I’m really old now.</p>
<p>I recall some people called USC the University of Spoiled Children. But some people loved it. My sister got a good education there but I think it has a much stronger academic reputation these days. It was mainly known for football in my day.</p>
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<p>USC was still known as that when I was attending high school in the early-mid '90s. The radical change in its reputation has only been happening for the last several years. </p>
<p>Then again, many high school classmates from my year and before are also surprised at how NYU’s rep went up the further you got from NYC and how far its reputation soared within the last 15+ years.</p>
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<p>NYU seems to be a very popular “dream school” around these forums; I have no idea why.</p>
<p>Sarah Lawrence College also seems to be mentioned far more often than one would expect for a specialty school (in visual and performing arts).</p>
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<p>Combination of NYU’s ramping up their marketing machine and genuine improvements made to many academic departments like Philosophy which is ranked #1 for grad after they poached several bigname Profs from elite institutions worldwide. Stunning considering how back in my high school days…it was easier to get into NYU CAS or even Stern than it was to get into Binghamton…the top SUNY back then. </p>
<p>Only thing which remained the same from my high school days is the miserly levels of FA/scholarship money and judging by what I heard from recent NYU grads the bureaucracy.</p>
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<p>Back in high school…all I knew was that it was an LAC for more mainstream artsy kids who couldn’t get into Vassar.</p>
<p>^^ USC and NYU are the top two film schools in the country and select only a very few applicants each year. That’s the reason they are “dream” schools for film majors, anyway.</p>
<p>Yes, but also, the kids these days really prefer the urban schools to the ones in the middle of nowhere, significantly so.</p>
<p>For example, on a state school note, look at UWashington, which is in Seattle and UMinnesota which is in the twin cities. They want to be in the city.</p>
<p>Don’t be silly. Sarah Lawrence is not a “specialty school in visual and performing arts.” It is a normal LAC with a strong humanities orientation in a great location on the NYC transportation grid. Because of that, it attracts both very strong faculty and very strong students who want to be in NYC, including people interested in visual and performing (and literary) arts, but that’s far from the whole story.</p>
<p>And NYU is a dream school for lots of the same reasons. If your idea of a great college is a college-town cloister like Dartmouth, Amherst, or Princeton, it’s not going to be so attractive. But if you want to be in New York City, it would be hard to be more exciting than NYU with its Greenwich Village non-campus. It has a premier performing arts and theater tech school, a business school that’s close enough to first-rank, an attractive build-your-own-major program, celebrity students, and (as noted above) really strong departments in many areas. All that, and four years of housing in a great part of Manhattan at way below market rates. Plus, unlike Harvard, etc., it actually accepts lots of applicants – and some people like their dreams to be somewhat attainable. Can’t blame them for that.</p>
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<p>Sarah Lawrence course catalog:
[Undergraduate</a> Catalogue](<a href=“http://www.slc.edu/catalogue/index.html]Undergraduate”>Disciplines and Programs of Study | Sarah Lawrence College)</p>
<p>The subjects in which it has enough breadth and depth to interest someone who would major in them are limited to:</p>
<p>dance
history
literature
music
psychology
theater
visual arts
writing
interdisciplinary combinations of mostly the above (e.g. area and ethnic studies)</p>
<p>Note that other humanities like philosophy, art history, and foreign languages are rather limited. So are social studies other than psychology, and all sciences.</p>
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<p>True, Case does give some nice merit awards, but it’s also known for shorting people on need-based FA. The two often go hand-in-hand. Schools that don’t have enough money to meet 100% of need often elect to marshal their resources and use them to induce the highest-stats kids to attend, leaving the rest of the entering class to fend for themselves. Average total indebtedness of graduating seniors is approximately $40K, which is extremely high.</p>
<p>From a purely numbers perspective it would seem that getting into top schools ‘back in the day’ was SIGNIFICANTLY easier…for example Yale’s admit rate was 26.4% in 1976 vs. 7.4% for the most recent year. The primary driver of this has been the growth in number of applicants (~9,400 in 1976 vs. ~27,000 in 2011) as the total number of students matriculating was roughly the same in both years ~1,300. </p>
<p>However, one could postulate that, although it was ‘numerical’ easier to get in back in the 1970s, from a qualitative perspective it was likely comparably difficult (today is probably still slightly harder but it was still tough at the time) to get in. At the time you had a ‘small’ applicant pool (probably more regional to the northeast) which was likely almost entirely comprised of relatively competititve applicants for the time (decently high grades and test scores), in addition to a sizeable pool of legacy / connection applicants (likely higher than today which again limits the number of slots allocated to ‘regular’ applicants). Combining these factors, the competitive set faced back in the 1970 was still likely to be extremely tough - even if the admit rate was 26%. Today, with the millions spent of marketing, you likely have a mixed candidate pool where a decent percentage of the pool is made up of people who have absolutely no chance of getting in. Additionally, the basic thing that has changed in admissions from the 1970s to today is the ‘one-up-manships’ in terms of test prep, ECs, etc. which have just raised the minimum bar for candidates which again probably limits the true competitive set faced by today’s applicants. </p>
<p>Overall, i think it was easier to get in back in the day, however, i wouldn’t say it was as easy as some of the anecdotal evidence presented in this thread may suggest. </p>
<p>Yale Data: “W033 Freshmen Admissions Summary” ([Detailed</a> Data | Office of Institutional Research](<a href=“http://oir.yale.edu/detailed-data#ycfreshmen]Detailed”>http://oir.yale.edu/detailed-data#ycfreshmen))</p>